Now Listening | El Guincho, A Music Phenom With Sensible Shoes

Pablo Díaz-Reixa, aka El Guincho (Oliver Faig)

“New York is going to be cold,” El Guincho said by phone last week from Barcelona. The 25-year-old musician was about to embark on his first proper U.S. tour and had the herculean task of scouring the Catalan capital, with its warmer climes, for winter wear. “I’m flying to the U.S. tomorrow,” he said exasperated, “and I have to find shoes for the cold.”

Thoughts of sub-Arctic temperatures were far from anyone’s mind last spring when the relatively obscure El Guincho (né Pablo Díaz-Reixa) played a sizzling set at Williamsburg’s Union Pool. From the moment the Canary Islands native took the stage, twiddling sampler knobs with his left hand while simultaneously playing live percussion with his right hand and foot, he shook the full house with a potent potage of Latin beats, tripped-out techno, tribal chants, Afro-Caribbean percussion and infectious melodies. Music, however, is only one hue among many of this artist’s Technicolor palate.

Dressed to Kill | ‘Decampment’

“We never intended to make a film,” explains Nicola Kuperus from the Detroit-based electronic band Adult. “We were planning to make music to go with my photographs and put it all together as a complete story. After we sketched it out, we got a call from the Detroit Institute of Arts asking us to play, but we weren’t interested in playing live, so we decided to do something special.”

The result is “Decampment,” a silent horror film made by Kuperus and her bandmate/husband Adam Lee Miller which was recently screened at NYC’s Anthology Archives and will screen at L.A.’s Silent Movie Theatre on November 18. The forty-minute art house slasher flick, complete with live throbbing techno-electro soundtrack by Adult, revolves around a sharply dressed coven of murderous female zombies in tight fitting black dress suits with matching high heels and hand bags that wouldn’t look out of place on the set of “Mad Men” —

Merch Madness | CMJ Band T-Shirts

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This week, thousands of young, zealous music fans descended upon New York City for the 28th annual CMJ Music Marathon to see roughly 1,200 bands playing at over 75 sites across the city. The assortment of microgenres at this year’s confab — including world music noise, minimal techno, avant-garde metal and dancehall grime — was reflected in the multitude of well-designed band T-shirts. Take the experimental indie band Shearwater, for example, who hired the visual artists

Borscht Belt Bohemia | All Tomorrow’s Parties

 

Kutsher’s Resort. (Kate Glicksberg)

“It’s the kind of place homeless Jews come to get bar mitzvahed,” joked the comedian Joe Derosa, referring to Kutsher’s, the run-down Catskill Mountain resort in Monticello, N.Y., that has clearly seen better days. Still, its storied history never included anything quite like All Tomorrow’s Parties, a large, experimental U.K. music festival held here last weekend and bringing roughly 3,000 of the indiest of indie rock kids to the borscht belt complex.

Helen Kutsher. (Kate Glicksberg)

“It makes me very happy having all these young people here,” said Helen Kutsher, the hotel’s matriarch. Kutsher’s, once a regular stop for borscht belt royalty like Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Alan King and Shecky Green as well as contemporary (sorta) comedians like Billy Crystal and Jerry Seinfeld and … er … Yakov Smirnov, has been in business since 1907 and is the last remaining family-run resort in the Catskills.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, the hotel and its neighboring resorts provided New Yorkers, most often Jewish immigrants and their upwardly mobile offspring, an affordable respite —

Insider Art | The Prison Art Gallery

(George Bozeman)

The painting is a gorgeous abstract landscape rendered in green and azure hues with bold, chunky brush strokes. The $100 asking price doesn’t do the work justice, but considering the artist’s terse biography Scotch-taped to the back, the piece’s paltry fee reflects a different kind of justice:

Name: George Bozeman
Age: 55
Sex: M
Mailing Address: Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, La Grange, Kentucky
Description of Yourself for Book/Catalog: Serving a 105-year sentence.

Nick Zinner | No Shutterbugging Slouch

“Masks” (Photo by Nick Zinner, from Fuse Gallery)

“Twenty years after Bon Jovi’s ‘Dead or Alive’ video, does anyone really need to see more images of musicians on tour,” Nick Zinner asks. After seeing his surprisingly impressive photo exhibition “It’s OK Don’t Look At The Road” currently up at the East Village’s Fuse Gallery the only possible response is a resounding “hell yeah!”